The London Blitz Murders
Page 1
Praise for
The Lusitania Murders
“Entertaining… full of colorful characters… a stirring conclusion.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Collins ably weaves a well-paced, closed-environment mystery reminiscent of Agatha Christie… [He] succeeds in… re-imagining the Lusitania’s final voyage.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Titanic Murders
“Collins makes it sound as though it really happened.”
—New York Daily News
“Collins does a fine job of insinuating a mystery into a world-famous disaster… [he] manage[s] to raise plenty of goose bumps before the ship goes down for the count.”
—Mystery News
The Hindenburg Murders
“Max Allan Collins has become one of the masters of the twentieth-century historical mystery and The Hindenburg Murders will only augment his growing reputation.”
—BookBrowser
The Pearl Harbor Murders
“[Collins’s] descriptions are so vivid and colorful that it’s like watching a movie… [and he] gives the reader a front row seat.”
—Cozies, Capers & Crimes
… and for Max Allan Collins
“Max Allan Collins blends fact and fiction like no other writer.”
—Andrew Vachss, author of Flood
“A terrific writer!”
—Mickey Spillane
“Collins displays a compelling talent for flowing narrative and concise, believable dialogue.”
—Library Journal
“No one fictionalizes real-life mysteries better.”
—Armchair Detective
“An uncanny ability to blend fact and fiction.”
—South Bend Tribune
“When it comes to exploring the rich possibilities of history in a way that holds and entertains the reader, nobody does it better than Max Allan Collins.”
—John Lutz, author of Single White Female
“Collins’s blending of fact and fancy is masterful—there’s no better word for it. And his ability to sustain suspense, even when the outcome is known, is the mark of an exceptional storyteller.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Probably no one except E. L. Doctorow in Ragtime has so successfully blended real characters and events with fictional ones. The versatile Collins is an excellent storyteller.”
—The Tennessean
“The master of true-crime fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2004 Max Allan Collins
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612185200
ISBN-10: 1612185207
In memory of JaNiece Mull, who loved Agatha Christie
Though this work is a work of fiction, an underpinning of history supports the events depicted in these pages. The author intends no disrespect for the real people who inspired the characterizations herein, nor to take lightly the two wartime reigns of terror they endured—the Blitz… and the Blackout Ripper.
“The truth is that one never believes for a minute—no matter what danger you’re in—that you yourself are going to be killed. The bomb is always going to hit the other person.”
Agatha Christie
CONTENTS
BEFORE…
FEBRUARY 9, 1942
ONE: SCANT SHELTER
TWO: PRESCRIPTION: MURDER
THREE: TEN LITTLE ACTRESSES
FEBRUARY 10, 1942
FOUR: DRESSED FOR MURDER
FIVE: PRIVACY IN A PUBLIC HOUSE
FEBRUARY 11, 1942
SIX: A QUIET MORNING
FEBRUARY 12, 1942
SEVEN: A WOMAN’S TOUCH
FEBRUARY 13, 1942
EIGHT: SURVIVORS
NINE: SMASHING SUCCESS
TEN: SUITABLE FOR FRAMING
AFTER…
APPLAUSE IN THE DARK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BEFORE…
ON THE BRINK OF WAR, London was the largest and—in the opinion of many—greatest city in the world. Metropolitan London’s population was eight million and ever-growing, the population of Great Britain herself having risen some five million souls between the First War and the coming one… a third of whom lived or worked in London.
The Port of London commanded more tonnage than any other, generating a quarter of Britain’s imports; and better than half the world’s international trade passed through the claustrophobic, clogged financial district between the East End docks and the prosperous West End. Air travel was coming into its own as well, with London at the center of a network of airways making international travel fast and practical.
London, then as now, was the seat of government—legislative, executive and judiciary, with the House of Lords the Empire’s supreme court of appeal—as well as home to the royal capital… Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s and even the Tower of London down the Thames, where heads no longer rolled and the crown jewels were under watch by guards (and tourists).
Education was well-represented by eminent grammar schools (Alleyns, Battersea) and fine public schools (St. Paul’s, Westminster), while London University rivaled Cambridge and Oxford. There were museums—the British Museum and National Gallery were only the beginning of an impressive array—and theater that made New York’s Broadway look like the shabby vaudeville it was, plus comedies and musicals representing homegrown vaudeville as gloriously tasteless as anything the Yanks could muster.
Of course, a London resident had a higher cost of living than elsewhere in the kingdom; but the standard of living was also high, and even during the Depression—quelled by an economy spurred on by imminent war—unemployment had been low. The East End still had its share of poverty, however, and some considered a Bolshevik revolution inevitable.
A greater and even more imminent threat seemed to be London itself—its vulnerability, its dense population in a relatively small area, its attraction to an enemy desirous of delivering a “knock-out blow” to a target seemingly primed for an aerial attack.
And as we know, the bombs did drop… and the city did endure.
This is one small story in that greater drama, the account of one brave woman in that brave city, who like that city survived with dignity…
… and of a murderer who did not.
FEBRUARY 9, 1942
THE WARTIME BLACKOUT, IMPOSED IN September of ’39, was a fact of life Londoners had long since learned to live with—streetlights off, vehicles turned into one-eyed monsters (with the remaining headlight wearing a shade), and either a blocking board or black curtain screening all windows. Officious air wardens, particularly in the early days, had been the bullies in charge of banishing all illumination. Now no one thought about it, really. Compliance was second nature.
The blackout was part and parcel of being at war—like the sandbags piled high along sidewalks, the vaguely animal-like barrage balloons hovering over the city (like the air wardens, well-inflated), the starkly cheerful airbrushed posters advising Londoners to “carry on” and “do their bit.” Even the sentries at Buckingham Palace had swapped their bright red uniforms for dingy battle fatigues, and streetcorner bobbies had traded in their helmets
for tin hats.
Over two years into the war now, it was difficult to remember a time when children played on the sidewalks (most kiddies had been evacuated early on), and when automobiles on the street were thick as flies and not scarce as hen’s teeth—a time when the tabloids were longer than a few pages, and a sales clerk wrapped your package in precious paper.
The city, or at least its people, seemed shabby of late—the clothing drab in color, often threadbare, no matter what your social status; new clothing was a rarity in this town, and when you wore new togs, you felt vaguely ashamed. The drabness extended itself to buildings—broken windows had become the exception, not the rule, and few structures wore fresh coats of paint; it seemed lacking in taste, somehow, when neighboring structures were piles of rubble.
Not that the city allowed itself to be a dirty, dusty shambles—repairs were constant. On this typically overcast, coldly dreary Monday morning, the street and sidewalks dusted with snow, workmen were repairing potholes. The latter were not the fault of the Germans—the last major attack had been back in May, after all, on the tenth…
… a night no one living in London was likely to forget. The Thames at low ebb, the moon full, the Luftwaffe delivered the war’s worst raid thus far—Westminster Abbey damaged, the Mint, the Tower, the Law Courts, the British Museum hit, even Big Ben’s face had been scarred (though still tolling right on time), as fires raged… and more than three thousand Londoners lost their lives….
A shattered city had trembled, dreading the next attack; but nothing came, not for months, and even then nothing to compare to the tenth of May. And as days turned to weeks and weeks to months, the sense that the Blitz might be (dare one say it?) over provided a desperation-tinged hope.
Not that the city was letting down. Small but punishing German raids did occasionally still occur, the all-too-familiar banshee warning again piercing the London air—particularly following an Allied raid, most particularly when the target had been Berlin.
And, so, sandbags and rationing and propaganda posters and of course the blackout continued.
But the shelters weren’t being so widely used, in this lull in the Blitz; and even when bombs were raining on London, many had preferred to stay home and take their chances, rather than crawl into a privately owned (usually ensconced in a garden) Anderson shelter, two corrugated sheets of steel bolted at the top, stuck three feet into the earth, with a sheet-metal door, and protected by an earthen embankment. With no drainage, these shelters for six were a nightmare; between the rain and certain human needs, one well might prefer the relative dignity of staying home and being blown to smithereens.
Then there was the public standard shelter of brick-and-lime mortar walls, perched unsupported on a roadway, with a nine-inch reinforced concrete slab on top. The public had soon dubbed these sandwich shelters, because a blast could suck the shelter walls outward, turning the occupants into the meat between concrete and roadway slices.
The “tubes” of the subway system were adapted into shelters as well, but mosquitoes and fierce winds (sometimes cold, sometimes hot) eventually relegated that option to the homeless. Little societies had developed down there, and even though they could be relocated, these ragged bands preferred their new underground world.
A workman named Peter Rushing, age thirty-eight, lanky and hard-hewed, was running short on sand in his pothole-filling effort. He knew where to “borrow” some, easy enough….
Brick shelters like this one had to be built in the streets; there was no room, was there, for a structure like this in Montague Place, in the Central London district of Marlyebone, whose long, straight streets and endless rows of stately buildings—occasionally disrupted by bombed-out patches, like absent teeth in an otherwise impressive smile—included scant room for gardens. This shelter—between Edgware Road and Baker Street (both of whose flats and high-class shops had largely been destroyed in 1940’s raids)—was but one of hundreds lining London’s streets, a spare cubicle with a seat built along one side. Nothing could be more ordinary.
And yet Peter Rushing discovered something—someone—quite extraordinary, when he ducked into the stall intending to nick some sand from an already spilled-open sandbag.
The woman was striking—what you would call handsome as opposed to beautiful, with short, dark, nicely coifed hair and good cheekbones. She was not seated on the bench; rather she lay sprawled on the roadway floor of the shelter, her clothing—white blouse, dark brown jacket, lighter brown skirt—disarrayed, up over long legs that had been darkened with a liquid product to give the impression of silk stockings.
Her eyes were open and staring blankly. She had been gagged with a silk scarf, but was not otherwise bound, her arms and hands and legs splayed. No purse seemed present, but items apparently dumped from a purse were scattered nearby—lipstick, compact, handkerchief, and such. An electric torch—the woman’s presumably—lay a ways from the body, its dim beam casting a small yellow circle on the brick wall under the bench.
And for the first time since the Blitz had begun, Peter Rushing was truly frightened. What he was viewing was not the impersonal carnage of war, rather the wanton destruction of one human’s life by another.
“Freddie!” he called. “Come ’ere, lad!”
Freddie Sangster, a short chubby bloke of twenty-odd, did not move quickly; he had a game leg that had kept him doing roadwork during wartime. But when he got there, Freddie was quick to say, “Blimey,” and agree that one of them should stay with the corpse, and the other go for the coppers.
And being the younger, Freddie got to stay and keep the woman company.
The boy was sitting on the bench, hunched over, his hands folded, his eyes on the handsome quite dead woman, watching her carefully, as if to make sure she didn’t make a break for it.
And in the meantime, Peter Rushing did make a break for it—rushing off to find the nearest telephone.
ONE
SCANT SHELTER
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR EDWARD GREENO, Criminal Investigation Division, Scotland Yard, answered the call.
Greeno was a tall, square-shouldered man with a bucket head and bulldog features, a ready all-knowing smile and small dark eyes that missed little. He was one of the hardest-nosed coppers in town, and knew it; an inveterate horseplayer, Greeno had been approached with more bribe offers than a good-looking dame got whistles.
But much to the consternation of London’s gangsters, Greeno was as straight as he was tough.
He stepped from the police Austin, allowing his driver to go park it, and strode toward the crime scene in snapbrim and raincoat, like any good detective; but what was a fashion statement for American dicks was a necessity for the likes of Greeno: the rain here was no joke, even though today it was a whispering of snow.
The inspector was a veteran of the legendary Flying Squad—sometimes called the Sweeney (short for Sweeney Todd, in cockney rhyming slang)—which “flew” to crime scenes and took literal pursuit of villains. He had earned countless commendations from judges and Scotland Yard commissioners, and crime reporter Percy Hoskins had called him “the underworld’s public enemy number one.”
Now Greeno, with what he considered to be a rather burdensome reputation, was attached to the Murder Squad—as it was unofficially known—though, unlike many chief inspectors, he had not during his sergeant days assisted on murder investigations.
Accordingly, Ted Greeno had only been investigating murders for a little over a year, and in wartime London, murders had been few. Crime was down all over London, actually.
In Greeno’s view, there was nothing patriotic about it: a villain in peacetime was a villain in wartime. But with fewer motor cars around to nick, fewer got nicked; burglary was way down as well, since the blackout deterred crims, who had no way to know if a house or building was empty or not. Street violence, with an eye on robbery, was up, however—blackout bashing for cash seldom turned the corner into murder, though.
This was an apparent ex
ception to that rule.
He had called for Sir Bernard Spilsbury to meet him at the scene of the crime. The renowned pathologist was on twenty-four hour call for the C.I.D., officially attached to the Home Office, although he worked not out of Scotland Yard but University College Hospital. The good doctor was not here as yet.
After he stepped through the narrow, doorless passageway in the high brick shelter walls, the inspector touched nothing. He did kneel over the dead woman and noted the state of her clothing’s disarray… and the absence of a handbag. The purple bruises made by fingers on her throat were obvious even in the dimness of the shelter.
Had some thief strangled this woman over the contents of her bag? Had a few shillings cost this handsome woman her life?
Oddly, a fairly expensive-looking gold watch remained on the woman’s wrist. Perhaps in the darkness the murderous thief had missed it.
Greeno would do little but wait until Sir Bernard was on hand. Confident as he might be about his skills as a police detective, Greeno knew that Spilsbury’s expertise—and his eventual ability to testify in court with clarity and convincingness—was worth waiting for.
But something tingled at the back of the detective’s neck—and in the pit of his stomach, a flutter of recognition. This corpse recalled another….
One of the relative handful of murders in recent months had been that of Maple Church, an attractive young woman found strangled and robbed in a wrecked building on Hampstead Road.
And this attractive woman had obviously been robbed; and strangled.
Greeno was standing outside the shelter, questioning the two workmen, when Sir Bernard drew up in his dark-green Armstrong-Siddeley saloon; characteristically, Spilsbury had driven himself. With the exception of the sedan itself—motor cars a relative rarity these days—the pathologist’s arrival was typically unobtrusive.